Craziness of the e-cigarette health police: 'Nanny state' Welsh Assembly considers ban in public spaces

By Stephen Robinson

Published: 20:36 EDT, 2 April 2014 | Updated: 05:16 EDT, 3 April 2014

Smoking hot: Sales of e-cigarettes have rocketed, trebling in three years

You can see people relaxing with them in pubs and restaurants. Occasionally fellow passengers will puff furtively on aeroplanes or trains.

Electronic cigarettes are suddenly everywhere, allowing smokers to ingest modest amounts of nicotine to keep their addiction at bay.

People turn to these e-cigarettes in the knowledge they are healthier than normal cigarettes, and sales have rocketed, trebling in three years.

At least half of ex-smokers say they used e-cigarettes to help in their battle to quit, while a third of smokers who buy them claim it has helped to reduce their tobacco intake.

Yet now the Nanny State wants to ban e-cigarettes, despite - or perhaps because of - the evident pleasure they offer their users.

There is overwhelming evidence that they are infinitely less harmful than traditional cigarettes, yet ministers in the Welsh Assembly believe no one should be allowed to puff on them in enclosed public places.

You can be sure that if the precedent is set, the rest of Britain is likely to follow.

Wales brought in the smoking ban in public places before England seven years ago.

And what better way could there be, asks Dr Ruth Hussey, the Welsh Chief Medical Officer, than to celebrate the seventh anniversary by showing that the principality ‘is once again at the forefront of a new set of radical proposals to improve public health’.

Ministers claim they are acting because the devices normalise smoking and undermine the smoking ban.

To examine the merits of this extremely dubious justification, we have to understand what modern e-cigarettes are and how they work.

They were invented in 2003 by a pharmacist in China called Hon Lik, who was a three-pack-a-day smoker.

When Lik’s father, also a heavy smoker, died of cancer, Lik looked for an alternative to cigarettes which would not kill him.

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Wales is considering a ban on the smoking of electronic cigarettes in enclosed public places

Most scientists say there is no evidence that nicotine itself is bad for you. It is indisputably addictive; it raises the heartbeat and treats your body rather as caffeine does, but it will not kill you — unless ingested in absurd quantities.

It’s the toxic chemicals created when tobacco and other products burn in normal cigarettes that harm you.

Essentially, Lik invented a plastic cigarette into which you place a cartridge of liquid nicotine which is drawn drag by drag into an atomising chamber where it is heated using battery power and turned into a vapour.

Flavouring is added to the nicotine vapour to make it appetising. Nothing is burned, there is no ash or tar, and no problem of passive smoking.

I have no personal stake in this tobacco debate, for my smoking days are behind me. In my 20s and well into my 30s, I loved my cigarettes but I accepted the overwhelming medical evidence that they kill you, which is why I reluctantly gave up. I still miss them.

'The puritans argue that, far from providing an exit route from a life of smoking, e-cigarettes are a gateway to a life of traditional smoking, cancer and tar-filled lungs'. File picture

Today, I dislike the smell of tobacco smoke on others, and I concede - though it goes against my personal libertarian impulses - that public spaces are much more pleasurable when they are free of smoke.

Guests in our home will be given an ashtray and are welcome to smoke, but, please, by an open window or in the garden if conditions allow.

Probably, the world is a better place since smoking was banned in public spaces.

When I gave up, I chewed for months on foul-tasting nicotine chewing gum. Perhaps the Welsh authorities also have this in their sights, for it seems palpably unjust to single out e-cigarettes as Welsh Assembly Health Minister Mark Drakeford has done.

‘E-cigarettes contain nicotine, which is highly addictive, and I want to minimise the risk of a new generation becoming addicted to this drug,’ he says.

Surveys show e-cigarettes to be more effective than gum at helping people to quit smoking, which is just one of the facts that make bossy Mr Drakeford’s comments and this proposed ban so absurd.

Academics across the world agree that e-cigarettes are less harmful than ordinary cigarettes.

As Professor Michael Siegel, an anti-smoking campaigner from Boston University School of Public Health, says: ‘Electronic cigarettes are much safer than conventional cigarettes and much more effective than traditional nicotine replacement products [such as gum] in keeping smokers off cigarettes.’

I wonder if it is the fact that e-cigarette smokers derive a certain pleasure that the puritan zealots object to.

Women, it has to be said, look dead sexy puffing on their e-cigs, with their smoky Bette Davis eyes.

One of the unheralded consequences of e-cigs is that they bring back together the smoker and non-smoker under the same roof.

No longer do smokers have to get their fix outside in the street.

Certainly, the anti-smoking lobby disapproves of self-indulgence, says Professor Siegel.

‘The ideology — which is governed by an abstinence-only philosophy — just doesn’t have room for a product that looks and acts like a cigarette but happens to be orders of a magnitude safer,’ he adds.

Electronic cigarettes were invented in 2003 by a pharmacist in China called Hon Lik, who was a three-pack-a-day smoker. File picture

‘In this case, the science - the health effects - just doesn’t matter. The ideology is too deeply ingrained to allow the product to be given a chance of saving lives.’

The puritans also argue that, far from providing an exit route from a life of smoking, e-cigarettes are a gateway to a life of traditional smoking, cancer and tar-filled lungs.

Let us forget, for the moment, that the drug which really serves as an inducement to a life of addiction, crime and destitution is cannabis — which, perversely, ministers everywhere seem appallingly relaxed about. 

And it is true that the tobacco giants have developed some sweet flavours for their e-cigarettes that could appeal to a younger market.

But the idea naughty schoolboys might nip behind the bike sheds for an e-cigarette is far-fetched to say the least.

The introduction of age limits on the sale of e-cigs - which are already under discussion - should put an end to any youthful indiscretions.

Academics across the world agree that e-cigarettes are less harmful than ordinary cigarettes

Meanwhile, the Welsh Assembly’s pious claim that the ban would improve public health appears grotesque in the light of the manifest failings of its health service in which any number of needless deaths have been ignored, or worse, hushed up.

Medical treatment and hospital waiting times in Wales are bad, and getting worse. So much so that the Welsh are coming over the border to English hospitals to be treated.

Ann Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley, has spoken out about her late husband dying ‘like a battery hen’ while nurses treated him with ‘coldness, resentment, indifference and even contempt’ at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, supposedly a flagship of the Welsh NHS.

Incredibly, the ruling bloc of Labour members on the Welsh Assembly have prevented Mrs Clwyd from giving evidence about the shameful treatment of her late husband to the Assembly’s health committee.

So the Welsh Assembly prefers to pursue hypothetical risks to health, such as people sucking blamelessly on nicotine-infused plastic tubes, rather than tackle what is right under their noses, and which is their direct responsibility to put right.

Mrs Clwyd says she regrets that she did not ‘stand in the hospital corridor and scream’ at the ‘almost callous lack of care’ she encountered when caring for her dying husband.

The awful truth is that these days, you are more likely to attract the attention of health care professionals in a hospital if you pull out an e-cigarette than if you complain about the shameful treatment of someone you love.